See the above cites. The government cannot say "Here you cannot protest us." The government doesn't get to hide from its citizens. And as far as the rights of landlords, notice how conspicuously absent they are from the Bill of Rights, while the right of people to petition and protest their government is the first order of business...
Essentially, the government does not get to hide from dissent by scheme or contrivance. The government does not get to put roadblocks in the way of citizens expressing their views. You don't get to avoid free speech by say, ordering people to limit the expressions of discontent to calling an 800 phone number no one monitors.
You never get to say, "The rules say you ain't got no rights here."
Here's the cites you were looking for:
The First Amendment:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
"The right of assembly was originally closely tied to the right to petition. One significant case involving the two rights was United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875). There, the Supreme Court held that citizens may "assemble for the purpose of petitioning Congress for a redress of grievances." Essentially, it was held that the right to assemble was secondary, while the right to petition was primary. Later cases, however, have expanded the meaning of the right to assembly. Hague v. CIO, 307 U.S. 496 (1939), for instance, refers to the right to assemble for the "communication of views on national questions" and for "disseminating information.""
Your problem here Moryath is that your "asswad shithead anarchists" will pretty much include a bunch of smelly drunk rioters who costume themselves like savages and harrass legitimate business shipping interests. They'll be headed up by bartenders and metal workers who pick flamboyant and self-indulgent names like "The Sons of Liberty." Sam Adams and Paul Revere were hardly the sort of proper, genteel people who wrote polite letters to their betters.
It should be simple. People have the right to petition for a redress of grievances, and if they exercise that right in a loud and obnoxious fashion, then so be it. It's still preferable to the acts of assault, kidnapping, vandalism and sabotage that our Founding Fathers engaged in.
Absolutely nothing takes priority over that right, which is why it heads the list of the Bill of Rights as the First Amendment. If the government's there, then it's going to have to listen to all of its citizens, not just the demure and well-scrubbed ones. Hiding behind "This is private property" isn't going to cut it. If the government needs space, then let it exercise eminent domain and simply declare the space it needs and build a building, but under no circumstances should the right of the people to petition the government for a redress of grievances be abridged.
You get no argument from me on any of that. I'm a teetotaler who thinks the only thing dumber than doing drugs recreationally is criminalizing them. I never followed the logic that we're going to ruin someone's life to keep them from ruining their life. Twisting hemp into rope is good. Weaving it is great. Smoking it is stupid, but pursuing a multi-trillion dollar drug war like you've never heard the name Carrie Nation is... words just fail.
...because the Stupid Humans don't get that it's EXACTLY that instability that makes FTL possible. You CAN'T go FTL UNLESS it's unstable.
Of course, Gragnar forgets it took him and his multipodia brethren a hundred years and 892 "chunky salsa" incidents before they figured out how to make a "mostly stable" instability...
Setting free those who were convicted of non-violent drug offenses then many will become tax paying employees...
Um, and these jobs are coming from where? Why do you think these people started selling drugs in the first place? Because that $90K Oracle DBA Manager job was so unfulfilling? There are notable exceptions, of course, but people generally turn to selling drugs because they can't find a niche in the straight economy to begin with. I remember reading a study a while back, and the "average" drug dealer makes something like $10 an hour when everything is taken into account.
Have you tried to find a job with a felony conviction on your record lately? We've got people with Masters degrees slinging coffee at Starbucks, and I don't mean just the MFAs. People who sold drugs for a living generally haven't finished their CCIE yet. You think these guys are going to take a job at the factory? I doubt their Chinese is good enough.
The sort of jobs these people could hold no longer exist in our economy. God knows I wish they did. The ridiculously high level of incarceration in our society, from a macro perspective, is more about masking the true unemployment rate than punishing/rehabilitating criminals.
The War on Drugs is bloody farce kept alive by a zombie bureaucracy against all reason. The people incarcerated by it are punished beyond conscience.
But don't think that closing the War on Drugs is going to be the end of the problem. All that's going to do is stop whitewashing over the rot and decay. Once we quit hiding behind this silly "War," the real work is going to begin.
"By teaching people to hold their beliefs up to experiment, 'Mythbusters' is doing more to drag humanity out of the unscientific darkness than a thousand lessons in rigor. Show them some love."
ED-209 only offered 20 seconds to comply. Personally, I'd just open fire until I emptied my guns and tell the smoking remains, "You shouldn't have pissed us off..."
If anything, good writers are even more rare than good actors. I have yet to meet the fiction writer who can fall back on their looks.
The problem is a fundamental disconnect. Good dialogue makes the actor look good. Good structure makes the director look brilliant. A script that stinks just makes the movie overall look bad, but generally no one blames the actors. In the end -- and yeah, this is oversimplification -- writers get none of their due and all of the blame.
Studio executives -- who famously refer to screenwriters as the "highest paid secretaries on Earth" -- honestly believe successful movies are the result of their business acumen. They take arrogant cluelessness to a level Marie Antoinette would have boggled at. Witness the latest SciFi/Syfy debacle.
Everyone wants to sleep with the actors, and the studio execs understand lust. Directors are the boss, and studio execs understand the boss needs to get paid. But frat boys turned studio nepotists almost intentionally refuse to understand the value of the script. They honestly believe Tricia Helfer's breasts do more for "Battlestar Galactica" than Ron Moore's scripts.
Even worse, every single one of those MBAs have delusions of Hammett -- or Snoopy at least -- and they all believe they could write the next Great American novel, if they just weren't so darn busy all the time, or could condescend to the menial labor of typing. Every Armani-clad jackass walking down Wilshire fancies himself a warrior-poet, strong yet sensitive, tortured and misunderstood.
Hell, even Saddam Hussein self-published a novel in which he saved the maiden of Iraq from the ravages of America, and his prose was even worse than this line. I guess it's easy to find success when you can have the critics tortured and beheaded.
It's hard to charge premium prices if your small, dedicated market doesn't perceive the value of your product, and even worse, are all convinced they could do better than Twain and Shakespeare's bastard love child if they just took the time.
"Tongue-in-cheek is a term used to refer to humor in which a statement, or an entire fictional work, is not meant to be taken seriously, but its lack of seriousness is subtle. The origin of its usage comes from when Spanish minstrels would perform for various dukes in the 18th century; these dukes would silently chastise the silliness of the minstrel's performances by placing their tongue firmly to the side of their cheek. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as 'Ironic, slyly humorous; not meant to be taken seriously'."
Main Entry: science fiction Function: noun Date: 1851 : well-written fiction dealing principally with the impact of actual or imagined science on society or individuals or having a scientific factor as an essential orienting component -- science-fictional \s-n(t)s-fik-shnl, -sh-nl\ adjective
Eureka was done the second they turned it into a Degree antiperspirant infomercial. I can't believe they found a way to make me refuse to watch Salli Richardson-Whitfield.
Why is it that when a company makes unreasonable demands of it's workers, we're told "Either compete in the marketplace for what you need or shut up," but when workers make unreasonable demands on the company, suddenly we hear about "precious snowflakes taking advantage and wrecking our economy?"
Look, if it doesn't matter what demands a company makes in the marketplace, then it doesn't matter what demands the engineers make either. If some of the younger employees are forcing their companies to cough up nap times, blankies and all the SpongeBob DVDs they can watch, then I say more power to them.
Maybe those who so fervently preach about the "realities of the marketplace" should try actually dealing with them for once.
... and it's ridiculous that you have a legitimate fear that some cop could declare that to be a "concealed deadly weapon" and get away with ruining your life.
Look, I wouldn't want to see some guy with blown pupils around my kids' playground caressing a tacticool Rambo Survival bayonet whispering "My Preciousssss..." either. But as much as I don't want to see that, I also don't want to see a SWAT team blow my head off for carrying the whittler Grandpa left me...
And for the inevitable question of "Well, why do you need to carry a knife?" so far in the past week my Swiss Army Knife/Leatherman has been used to cut a length of rope at Home Depot, change batteries in a toy, open a 20-lb bag of rice, shave down a badly molded piece of plastic with a sharp edge, open a box from Grandma, and fix a loose power connection on a space heater.
When I carry my knife, I'm having delusions of MacGuyver, not Sho Kosugi.
I can't see how a cop could possibly make a case that any swiss army knife or leatherman is illegal.
They make the case by "intent." Almost all the states carry length laws on carried knives, usually between 3-5". They also include a wiggle clause that gives the officer discretion to determine "intent." If you carry a Q-tip with "intent," the law says you've just committed a crime.
There's currently a lawsuit in Dallas over Kershaw Leeks, a three-inch knife specifically designed to be opened with one hand, yet not be a switchblade (a knife where the blade is held against a compressed spring, deployed by releasing the catch and allowing the spring to propel the blade into place.) Some officer caught a teenager with one, decided it was a switchblade, and arrested the kid. The court found that if the officer thinks it's a switchblade, then it's a switchblade. This opened the door for the class-action lawsuit against Walmart, Target, and Cabelas for selling an illegal switchblade to their customers.
In a similar fashion, we've had cases where classic, traditional "been-sold-in-America-for-generations" Buck 110s were declared illegal "gravity" knives because the officer could open them by grabbing the _blade_ and, with considerable effort, throw the _handle_ open.
We're seeing a flood of reports of officers "confiscating" expensive tools out of what appears to be avarice. The usual drill goes like this. The officer sees a pocket clip or a bulge in your pocket. The officer stops you upon suspicion of carrying a concealed weapon. The officer finds the hundred-dollar Swisstool, Streamlight, Spyderco, etc they were looking for, and offers you a choice. We can confiscate it, or we can arrest you for carrying an illegal/concealed weapon. If you ask for a receipt, you get arrested.
Merely being arrested on a weapons charge has horrendous consequences. Many places of employment will immediately suspend you as a "risk to the workplace." If you carry a security clearance, at a minimum expect it to be harshly reviewed. When you go to look for your next job, the arrest will show up on the background check, and no, it won't help at all.
You can fight it, of course. You might even win. You'll be out a couple of grand for the defense, and you're likely to be out of a job at that point with diminished prospects for the next one.
The officer will not only suffer no repercussions, his "numbers" will improve for having made the arrest. It wasn't his fault that the commie-loving courts let you walk.
We're seeing trends where people who carry tools are taking pains to make them less noticeable. Pocket clips are being redesigned to blend in to clothing, or to look more like pens. Belt sheaths are beginning to disappear. A few guys I know are carrying their stuff in their inside breast pocket rather than at their waist specifically to keep them out of sight.
We now live in a country where the police are routinely taking moderately-expensive property from citizens simply because they can get away with it. At the rate we're going, I'm expecting to see on-the-spot bribes and other third-world police behavior before my kids finish school.
It's sickening, and I can't believe it's happening in my country.
I hope Carlin was wrong, and I hope he's currently listing the seven dirty words you'll never hear in Heaven, doing two shows a night at the club four blocks down from St. Peter's Gates...
Hard-core gadget geek here. If it says Surefire, Victorinox, Wenger, Leatherman, Nitecore or Spyderco, it's probably a good Christmas present idea for me. I doubt I'm alone on this on this board. I routinely carry a Surefire E1B (a very bright small flashlight the size of a roll of Lifesavers) and a Leatherman. You can't trace a cable you can't see, and the usefulness of a Leatherman around networking gear should explain itself.
The problem is that the laws as they are written define a weapon roughly as "anything the officer wants." People have been arrested for carrying Swiss Army Knives the officers chose to call a "hidden dirk or dagger." People have been arrested for carrying Surefire 6Ps (a six-inch long flashlight. Turns out the officer wanted to "confiscate" an expensive piece of gear). A couple of summers back, an off-duty police officer working private security told my wife she couldn't bring a six-pack of cokes into the amusement park because the aluminum can could be used as a weapon. The vendors were selling cans of cokes not 50 feet from the gate, of course.
When you hear "weapons violation," you used to think hidden foot-long boot daggers, rifles illegally converted to full auto, sawed-off shotguns, live grenades and the like. Today, more often than not, being arrested for "carrying a deadly weapon," means you were holding a Maglight to see your way to your car in a dark parking lot.
You think I'm joking? Anyone remember the terrorist Lite-Brite Toy Incident in Boston?
What you say in a public forum, ESPECIALLY as a public official in a critical position of trust, matters. Make a joke about crashing planes on the TSA website, see what happens. Make any kind of joke in any kind of public forum about possibly harming the president of the United States and the Secret Service will absolutely pay you a visit.
How would you feel to know your doctor cruelly jokes about involuntarily euthanizing people over 40? A kindergarten teacher making jokes about molesting the kids? A contractor who jokes about building houses to fall in the first earthquake? I'm a network engineer, and I can assure you I don't joke about crashing the 911 systems or bringing down the hospitals and airports I'm the lead engineer for.
I love Bill Hicks. I thank God for Penn Gillette. Richard Pryor is a certified genius. We will not see the like of Jonathan Swift again. But when my wife is in the middle of a c-section, I don't wanna hear the anesthesiologist go "Hey Dude, do you want a hit of this too?" It would be hilarious, and I would have to kill him.
A police officer who jokes about beating people and planting evidence does not have the temperment or trustworthiness for the job.
You could study criminology and learn what I'm about to tell you. You could study sociology and learn what I'm about to tell you. You could read Dickens, Hugo or Moore and learn it, or you could teach high school and find it out the hard way. You could even blacksmith for a while, hammer on some metal, learn what they mean by "work hardening" and learn what I'm about to tell you by metaphor.
Raising penalties doesn't stop bad behavior. It just makes the game meaner.
By raising penalties, you're hoping the alter the "risk/reward" calculation in the offender's head. The problem is, most offenders don't expect to get caught, so their risk is always zero. If you're trying to wrap your head around that, think of it in terms of how the young think they're immortal. I personally didn't really know, in my heart, that I would die one day until I was forty.
It usually takes a few iterations of "offense/punishment" until the offender changes their behavior. If you really want someone to change, you have to use the carrot as well as the stick. You have to pull them as well as push. "That's the wrong way, here's a better way."
You want to empty the prisons of young people? Give them hard, meaningful, responsible work that pays them well and garners the respect of the community. You want them to show you respect and responsibility? Then you have to GIVE them respect and responsibility. I don't mean flipping burgers and taking abuse all day. Put them to work doing jobs they can be proud of, and the prisons will empty of all but the most recalcitrant.
The problem is the carrot costs money. It costs the top economic tiers easy profit. And worst of all, the carrot doesn't give them the sick raging wife-beating hard-on that the stick does.
The stick makes them feel powerful. It makes them feel mighty. It feels GOOD to be able to MAKE people do what you want. "Steal a candy bar? LOSE A HAND!" It's quick, it's easy, it seems cheap (at least out the outset). Hell, in America, you can even make a profit off of it.
And it's totally counterproductive.
When some kid steals a candy bar and loses a hand, he knows there's no such thing as justice, only power. He learns he was punished not for theft, but for insulting the powerful. You lose all possibility of rehabilitation, and have made an outsider, an enemy of society for life.
Study your history. The harsher the penalties, the faster your prisons flood until eventually you come to a Vlad Tepes world where there are no "soft" moves left. You lose all nuance, and with penalties and offenses both set to their extreme, life expectancies begin to drop precipitously.
Crime is a function of the economy, and trying to suppress it through increased punishment merely tightens the release valve on the pressure cooker. If you want to lessen crime, you have to increase meaningful employment. Telling me I can't carry my Leatherman is just "security theater" that doesn't even begin to address the problem.
Now, the reason, though, that he gives for this is that a private corporation owns his data in the present system, but if the government owned, then, somehow, he'd own it more.
That's the crazy thing. There's no such thing as "public ownership".
I visited Washington DC a while back. I stood on the Mall. I stood on the Lincoln Memorial. I own a piece of it. So do you. I ran my fingers down the names on the black Wall, and I knew that my family had bought a piece of it at the cost of blood. I looked up at the top of that giant obelisk and knew that Washington had given me a piece of it. I walked through Arlington. I for damn sure own a piece of that.
Yes, if the government owns it, you absolutely own it more. You own it more because there's a huge difference between being a citizen and being a customer. I own it more because generations of my kin have stood in uniform and fought and bled for it.
If there's truly no such thing as "public ownership," then why is my family pulling on uniforms and strapping on guns to fight for it?
Slashdot Mirror
See the above cites. The government cannot say "Here you cannot protest us." The government doesn't get to hide from its citizens. And as far as the rights of landlords, notice how conspicuously absent they are from the Bill of Rights, while the right of people to petition and protest their government is the first order of business...
Essentially, the government does not get to hide from dissent by scheme or contrivance. The government does not get to put roadblocks in the way of citizens expressing their views. You don't get to avoid free speech by say, ordering people to limit the expressions of discontent to calling an 800 phone number no one monitors.
You never get to say, "The rules say you ain't got no rights here."
Here's the cites you were looking for:
The First Amendment:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Petition_and_assembly
"The right of assembly was originally closely tied to the right to petition. One significant case involving the two rights was United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875). There, the Supreme Court held that citizens may "assemble for the purpose of petitioning Congress for a redress of grievances." Essentially, it was held that the right to assemble was secondary, while the right to petition was primary. Later cases, however, have expanded the meaning of the right to assembly. Hague v. CIO, 307 U.S. 496 (1939), for instance, refers to the right to assemble for the "communication of views on national questions" and for "disseminating information.""
Your problem here Moryath is that your "asswad shithead anarchists" will pretty much include a bunch of smelly drunk rioters who costume themselves like savages and harrass legitimate business shipping interests. They'll be headed up by bartenders and metal workers who pick flamboyant and self-indulgent names like "The Sons of Liberty." Sam Adams and Paul Revere were hardly the sort of proper, genteel people who wrote polite letters to their betters.
It should be simple. People have the right to petition for a redress of grievances, and if they exercise that right in a loud and obnoxious fashion, then so be it. It's still preferable to the acts of assault, kidnapping, vandalism and sabotage that our Founding Fathers engaged in.
Absolutely nothing takes priority over that right, which is why it heads the list of the Bill of Rights as the First Amendment. If the government's there, then it's going to have to listen to all of its citizens, not just the demure and well-scrubbed ones. Hiding behind "This is private property" isn't going to cut it. If the government needs space, then let it exercise eminent domain and simply declare the space it needs and build a building, but under no circumstances should the right of the people to petition the government for a redress of grievances be abridged.
Dude! How heinously bogus can you get? You totally spaced on my beloved favorites, the TRaSh-80 and the Timex Sinclair.
You get no argument from me on any of that. I'm a teetotaler who thinks the only thing dumber than doing drugs recreationally is criminalizing them. I never followed the logic that we're going to ruin someone's life to keep them from ruining their life. Twisting hemp into rope is good. Weaving it is great. Smoking it is stupid, but pursuing a multi-trillion dollar drug war like you've never heard the name Carrie Nation is ... words just fail.
...because the Stupid Humans don't get that it's EXACTLY that instability that makes FTL possible. You CAN'T go FTL UNLESS it's unstable.
Of course, Gragnar forgets it took him and his multipodia brethren a hundred years and 892 "chunky salsa" incidents before they figured out how to make a "mostly stable" instability...
Setting free those who were convicted of non-violent drug offenses then many will become tax paying employees...
Um, and these jobs are coming from where? Why do you think these people started selling drugs in the first place? Because that $90K Oracle DBA Manager job was so unfulfilling? There are notable exceptions, of course, but people generally turn to selling drugs because they can't find a niche in the straight economy to begin with. I remember reading a study a while back, and the "average" drug dealer makes something like $10 an hour when everything is taken into account.
Have you tried to find a job with a felony conviction on your record lately? We've got people with Masters degrees slinging coffee at Starbucks, and I don't mean just the MFAs. People who sold drugs for a living generally haven't finished their CCIE yet. You think these guys are going to take a job at the factory? I doubt their Chinese is good enough.
The sort of jobs these people could hold no longer exist in our economy. God knows I wish they did. The ridiculously high level of incarceration in our society, from a macro perspective, is more about masking the true unemployment rate than punishing/rehabilitating criminals.
The War on Drugs is bloody farce kept alive by a zombie bureaucracy against all reason. The people incarcerated by it are punished beyond conscience.
But don't think that closing the War on Drugs is going to be the end of the problem. All that's going to do is stop whitewashing over the rot and decay. Once we quit hiding behind this silly "War," the real work is going to begin.
The obligatory XKCD link...
http://xkcd.com/397/
"By teaching people to hold their beliefs up to experiment, 'Mythbusters' is doing more to drag humanity out of the unscientific darkness than a thousand lessons in rigor. Show them some love."
That and string theorists taste empty...
ED-209 only offered 20 seconds to comply. Personally, I'd just open fire until I emptied my guns and tell the smoking remains, "You shouldn't have pissed us off..."
If anything, good writers are even more rare than good actors. I have yet to meet the fiction writer who can fall back on their looks.
The problem is a fundamental disconnect. Good dialogue makes the actor look good. Good structure makes the director look brilliant. A script that stinks just makes the movie overall look bad, but generally no one blames the actors. In the end -- and yeah, this is oversimplification -- writers get none of their due and all of the blame.
Studio executives -- who famously refer to screenwriters as the "highest paid secretaries on Earth" -- honestly believe successful movies are the result of their business acumen. They take arrogant cluelessness to a level Marie Antoinette would have boggled at. Witness the latest SciFi/Syfy debacle.
Everyone wants to sleep with the actors, and the studio execs understand lust. Directors are the boss, and studio execs understand the boss needs to get paid. But frat boys turned studio nepotists almost intentionally refuse to understand the value of the script. They honestly believe Tricia Helfer's breasts do more for "Battlestar Galactica" than Ron Moore's scripts.
Even worse, every single one of those MBAs have delusions of Hammett -- or Snoopy at least -- and they all believe they could write the next Great American novel, if they just weren't so darn busy all the time, or could condescend to the menial labor of typing. Every Armani-clad jackass walking down Wilshire fancies himself a warrior-poet, strong yet sensitive, tortured and misunderstood.
Hell, even Saddam Hussein self-published a novel in which he saved the maiden of Iraq from the ravages of America, and his prose was even worse than this line. I guess it's easy to find success when you can have the critics tortured and beheaded.
It's hard to charge premium prices if your small, dedicated market doesn't perceive the value of your product, and even worse, are all convinced they could do better than Twain and Shakespeare's bastard love child if they just took the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue-in-cheek
"Tongue-in-cheek is a term used to refer to humor in which a statement, or an entire fictional work, is not meant to be taken seriously, but its lack of seriousness is subtle. The origin of its usage comes from when Spanish minstrels would perform for various dukes in the 18th century; these dukes would silently chastise the silliness of the minstrel's performances by placing their tongue firmly to the side of their cheek. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as 'Ironic, slyly humorous; not meant to be taken seriously'."
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/science+fiction
Main Entry: science fiction
Function: noun
Date: 1851
: well-written fiction dealing principally with the impact of actual or imagined science on society or individuals or having a scientific factor as an essential orienting component
-- science-fictional \s-n(t)s-fik-shnl, -sh-nl\ adjective
Once "Eureka" is done this summer,
Eureka was done the second they turned it into a Degree antiperspirant infomercial. I can't believe they found a way to make me refuse to watch Salli Richardson-Whitfield.
Why is it that when a company makes unreasonable demands of it's workers, we're told "Either compete in the marketplace for what you need or shut up," but when workers make unreasonable demands on the company, suddenly we hear about "precious snowflakes taking advantage and wrecking our economy?"
Look, if it doesn't matter what demands a company makes in the marketplace, then it doesn't matter what demands the engineers make either. If some of the younger employees are forcing their companies to cough up nap times, blankies and all the SpongeBob DVDs they can watch, then I say more power to them.
Maybe those who so fervently preach about the "realities of the marketplace" should try actually dealing with them for once.
Can you imagine the rant we'd get?
... and it's ridiculous that you have a legitimate fear that some cop could declare that to be a "concealed deadly weapon" and get away with ruining your life.
Look, I wouldn't want to see some guy with blown pupils around my kids' playground caressing a tacticool Rambo Survival bayonet whispering "My Preciousssss..." either. But as much as I don't want to see that, I also don't want to see a SWAT team blow my head off for carrying the whittler Grandpa left me...
And for the inevitable question of "Well, why do you need to carry a knife?" so far in the past week my Swiss Army Knife/Leatherman has been used to cut a length of rope at Home Depot, change batteries in a toy, open a 20-lb bag of rice, shave down a badly molded piece of plastic with a sharp edge, open a box from Grandma, and fix a loose power connection on a space heater.
When I carry my knife, I'm having delusions of MacGuyver, not Sho Kosugi.
Next week, in a dramatic new spin-off from "Lie To Me," the premiere of "Sniff Me," starring the Ghost of Abe Vigoda.
Yes, GP was referring to that.
I can't see how a cop could possibly make a case that any swiss army knife or leatherman is illegal.
They make the case by "intent." Almost all the states carry length laws on carried knives, usually between 3-5". They also include a wiggle clause that gives the officer discretion to determine "intent." If you carry a Q-tip with "intent," the law says you've just committed a crime.
There's currently a lawsuit in Dallas over Kershaw Leeks, a three-inch knife specifically designed to be opened with one hand, yet not be a switchblade (a knife where the blade is held against a compressed spring, deployed by releasing the catch and allowing the spring to propel the blade into place.) Some officer caught a teenager with one, decided it was a switchblade, and arrested the kid. The court found that if the officer thinks it's a switchblade, then it's a switchblade. This opened the door for the class-action lawsuit against Walmart, Target, and Cabelas for selling an illegal switchblade to their customers.
In a similar fashion, we've had cases where classic, traditional "been-sold-in-America-for-generations" Buck 110s were declared illegal "gravity" knives because the officer could open them by grabbing the _blade_ and, with considerable effort, throw the _handle_ open.
We're seeing a flood of reports of officers "confiscating" expensive tools out of what appears to be avarice. The usual drill goes like this. The officer sees a pocket clip or a bulge in your pocket. The officer stops you upon suspicion of carrying a concealed weapon. The officer finds the hundred-dollar Swisstool, Streamlight, Spyderco, etc they were looking for, and offers you a choice. We can confiscate it, or we can arrest you for carrying an illegal/concealed weapon. If you ask for a receipt, you get arrested.
Merely being arrested on a weapons charge has horrendous consequences. Many places of employment will immediately suspend you as a "risk to the workplace." If you carry a security clearance, at a minimum expect it to be harshly reviewed. When you go to look for your next job, the arrest will show up on the background check, and no, it won't help at all.
You can fight it, of course. You might even win. You'll be out a couple of grand for the defense, and you're likely to be out of a job at that point with diminished prospects for the next one.
The officer will not only suffer no repercussions, his "numbers" will improve for having made the arrest. It wasn't his fault that the commie-loving courts let you walk.
We're seeing trends where people who carry tools are taking pains to make them less noticeable. Pocket clips are being redesigned to blend in to clothing, or to look more like pens. Belt sheaths are beginning to disappear. A few guys I know are carrying their stuff in their inside breast pocket rather than at their waist specifically to keep them out of sight.
We now live in a country where the police are routinely taking moderately-expensive property from citizens simply because they can get away with it. At the rate we're going, I'm expecting to see on-the-spot bribes and other third-world police behavior before my kids finish school.
It's sickening, and I can't believe it's happening in my country.
I hope Carlin was wrong, and I hope he's currently listing the seven dirty words you'll never hear in Heaven, doing two shows a night at the club four blocks down from St. Peter's Gates...
Hard-core gadget geek here. If it says Surefire, Victorinox, Wenger, Leatherman, Nitecore or Spyderco, it's probably a good Christmas present idea for me. I doubt I'm alone on this on this board. I routinely carry a Surefire E1B (a very bright small flashlight the size of a roll of Lifesavers) and a Leatherman. You can't trace a cable you can't see, and the usefulness of a Leatherman around networking gear should explain itself.
The problem is that the laws as they are written define a weapon roughly as "anything the officer wants." People have been arrested for carrying Swiss Army Knives the officers chose to call a "hidden dirk or dagger." People have been arrested for carrying Surefire 6Ps (a six-inch long flashlight. Turns out the officer wanted to "confiscate" an expensive piece of gear). A couple of summers back, an off-duty police officer working private security told my wife she couldn't bring a six-pack of cokes into the amusement park because the aluminum can could be used as a weapon. The vendors were selling cans of cokes not 50 feet from the gate, of course.
When you hear "weapons violation," you used to think hidden foot-long boot daggers, rifles illegally converted to full auto, sawed-off shotguns, live grenades and the like. Today, more often than not, being arrested for "carrying a deadly weapon," means you were holding a Maglight to see your way to your car in a dark parking lot.
You think I'm joking? Anyone remember the terrorist Lite-Brite Toy Incident in Boston?
What you say in a public forum, ESPECIALLY as a public official in a critical position of trust, matters. Make a joke about crashing planes on the TSA website, see what happens. Make any kind of joke in any kind of public forum about possibly harming the president of the United States and the Secret Service will absolutely pay you a visit.
How would you feel to know your doctor cruelly jokes about involuntarily euthanizing people over 40? A kindergarten teacher making jokes about molesting the kids? A contractor who jokes about building houses to fall in the first earthquake? I'm a network engineer, and I can assure you I don't joke about crashing the 911 systems or bringing down the hospitals and airports I'm the lead engineer for.
I love Bill Hicks. I thank God for Penn Gillette. Richard Pryor is a certified genius. We will not see the like of Jonathan Swift again. But when my wife is in the middle of a c-section, I don't wanna hear the anesthesiologist go "Hey Dude, do you want a hit of this too?" It would be hilarious, and I would have to kill him.
A police officer who jokes about beating people and planting evidence does not have the temperment or trustworthiness for the job.
Haven't lived in the UK. Have spent a lot of time in Compton and Venice in LA. Does that count?
Hi Vlad,
You could study criminology and learn what I'm about to tell you. You could study sociology and learn what I'm about to tell you. You could read Dickens, Hugo or Moore and learn it, or you could teach high school and find it out the hard way. You could even blacksmith for a while, hammer on some metal, learn what they mean by "work hardening" and learn what I'm about to tell you by metaphor.
Raising penalties doesn't stop bad behavior. It just makes the game meaner.
By raising penalties, you're hoping the alter the "risk/reward" calculation in the offender's head. The problem is, most offenders don't expect to get caught, so their risk is always zero. If you're trying to wrap your head around that, think of it in terms of how the young think they're immortal. I personally didn't really know, in my heart, that I would die one day until I was forty.
It usually takes a few iterations of "offense/punishment" until the offender changes their behavior. If you really want someone to change, you have to use the carrot as well as the stick. You have to pull them as well as push. "That's the wrong way, here's a better way."
You want to empty the prisons of young people? Give them hard, meaningful, responsible work that pays them well and garners the respect of the community. You want them to show you respect and responsibility? Then you have to GIVE them respect and responsibility. I don't mean flipping burgers and taking abuse all day. Put them to work doing jobs they can be proud of, and the prisons will empty of all but the most recalcitrant.
The problem is the carrot costs money. It costs the top economic tiers easy profit. And worst of all, the carrot doesn't give them the sick raging wife-beating hard-on that the stick does.
The stick makes them feel powerful. It makes them feel mighty. It feels GOOD to be able to MAKE people do what you want. "Steal a candy bar? LOSE A HAND!" It's quick, it's easy, it seems cheap (at least out the outset). Hell, in America, you can even make a profit off of it.
And it's totally counterproductive.
When some kid steals a candy bar and loses a hand, he knows there's no such thing as justice, only power. He learns he was punished not for theft, but for insulting the powerful. You lose all possibility of rehabilitation, and have made an outsider, an enemy of society for life.
Study your history. The harsher the penalties, the faster your prisons flood until eventually you come to a Vlad Tepes world where there are no "soft" moves left. You lose all nuance, and with penalties and offenses both set to their extreme, life expectancies begin to drop precipitously.
Crime is a function of the economy, and trying to suppress it through increased punishment merely tightens the release valve on the pressure cooker. If you want to lessen crime, you have to increase meaningful employment. Telling me I can't carry my Leatherman is just "security theater" that doesn't even begin to address the problem.
Now, the reason, though, that he gives for this is that a private corporation owns his data in the present system, but if the government owned, then, somehow, he'd own it more.
That's the crazy thing. There's no such thing as "public ownership".
I visited Washington DC a while back. I stood on the Mall. I stood on the Lincoln Memorial. I own a piece of it. So do you. I ran my fingers down the names on the black Wall, and I knew that my family had bought a piece of it at the cost of blood. I looked up at the top of that giant obelisk and knew that Washington had given me a piece of it. I walked through Arlington. I for damn sure own a piece of that.
Yes, if the government owns it, you absolutely own it more. You own it more because there's a huge difference between being a citizen and being a customer. I own it more because generations of my kin have stood in uniform and fought and bled for it.
If there's truly no such thing as "public ownership," then why is my family pulling on uniforms and strapping on guns to fight for it?